Seven leaders of Britain’s political parties took part yesterday in a televised election debate not unlike the debates that traditionally open the Republican presidential primary season. The test each leader had to pass in order to join the beanfeast was whether his or her party currently has seats in the House of Commons. By that test there should have been ten party leaders in the arena since three Northern Ireland parties were absent even though they enjoy Commons representation. Indeed, two NI parties have more MPs than the Greens who were represented on stage. What was the logic or justice of this selection process? It seemed to be that a ten-person debate would have been very hard for the media to control and for viewers to follow.

That’s true, of course, but you could say the same for the entire election process. Not only will there be at least ten parties with hopes of getting at least one parliamentary seat on May 7th, but there will be other parties standing without even that ambition. Most constituencies — including previously “safe seats” — will have a minimum of four rival candidates, all with a chance of either winning or tactically skewing the results. And together with other distorting factors — the incumbency effect, differing regional swings — the proliferation of parties and candidates makes this the most unpredictable U.K. election since 1945.

If the debate is any guide, however, it might also be the most peaceful and well-mannered election since 1945. All the party leaders kept to the procedural rules almost all of the time; they were polite to each other; and what fireworks there were fizzled. The general verdict by Good Friday morning was that no-one had really pulled away from the pack and that the evening would probably not change many votes. Small earthquake in Westminster etc. . .

That said, some curious discrepancies did emerge by this morning. In paraticular the judgment of the pundits on who won/who lost etc. differed quite considerably from the verdict of four opinion polls taken immediately after the debate. Westminster pundits generally thought that the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon had won the debate with a polished performance; that she and the two women leaders of the Greens and the Welsh Nationalists had together been more impressive than the four men; that Prime Minister David Cameron, though dull, had managed to appear more prime ministerial than Labour leader Ed Miliband; and that Nigel Farage had pleased his base but failed to move beyond it.

But when the four polls were published, they showed a different picture — not wholly different but significantly so. Anthony Wells on the indispensable website has the four results tabulated here:

The main points are as follows:

  1. Cameron, Miliband, and Farage were ahead of the pack and close together in three polls — and they performed well in the fourth.
  2. That fourth poll had Nicola Sturgeon as the winner by a comfortable eight-point lead over . . . Nigel Farage. She won 28 percent of viewers to his 20 percent.
  3. In all the polls Sturgeon outperformed the other women leaders (and the Liberal Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg) by a significant margin. They lagged far behind Sturgeon who lagged slightly behind Cameron, Miliband, and Farage.
  4. There was no sign in these polls that Cameron had pulled away from Miliband. There were like two runners who kept passing each other as the four races went on with Farage keeping up and occasionally taking the lead for himself.
  5. One interesting finding was that Farage was the only party leader who did better in the post-debate poll than his party is scoring in regular election polls—by 20 percent over 13 percent. Wells thought it a sign that the debate had helped Farage more than any other leader.

Can we draw any other conclusions? Only very tentatively at this stage. But I would hazard three:

The first (and clearest) is that—on these indicators—Farage and UKIP are replacing Clegg and the Lib-Dems as the third party in Britain’s two-and-a-half party system. Of course, the Lib-Dems will win more seats than UKIP because of Britain’s US-style first-past-the-post electoral system which penalizes new parties and helps incumbents. Also the Scot-Nats will win between thirty and forty seats in this parliament. So UKIP will not look like a winner on May 8th when it will have only a handful of seats. Its slow rise is taking place against a background of massive change (for which it is in part responsible.) But if that rise continues,

it will mean that UKIP, as Britain’s “swing party,” will be dragging politics to the Right rather than to the Left as when the Lib-Dems hold the balance. That’s a very big deal.

The second conclusion reverses the view of the punditocracy that Cameron had benefited from Farage’s presence in the debate. All the minor parties except UKIP were presenting a Left-to-Far-Left set of arguments. Farage was presenting an unabashedly conservative point of view. So they tended to direct their fire in debate at Farage, allowing Cameron an easier ride, and he gained gravitas thereby. That may be correct. But the opposite interpretation may hold water too – namely, that Farage struck right-wing voters as a stronger and more effective champion of their views under attack than the mildly passive Cameron. It is hard to know which interpretation is better. Both might even be correct – Cameron gaining herbivore votes from the Left while losing carnivore votes to Farage. But the fact that the UKIP leader outperformed his party’s opinion poll rating while Cameron failed to draw away from Miliband suggests that the second is probably nearer the mark.

The third conclusion is that the gap between the pundits and the voters on who won the debate suggests that even when the pundits make a strenuous effort to think outside the conventional wisdom of the political class, their instincts are still distorted by it. Their boosting of the three women leaders – credible in the case of Sturgeon, baffling in the case of the other two – reflects a feminist stress on “strong women” that is present in the electorate but to a lesser and less distorting effect. Then again, Clegg didn’t just do worse than Farage in the polls; he did far worse. But Clegg’s general preoccupations are more congenial to the pundits than are Farage’s. So they concluded that the two men had scored about equally.

Finally, the pundits almost certainly shared the emotional mood music of the debate which, in an unacknowledged tribute to George W. Bush, was one of “if someone’s hurting, then government’s gotta move.” All the candidates sang along with that theme for most of the time. Cameron and Farage were partial exceptions, the former because he’s running on a fiscal responsibility platform, the latter because he’s a Thatcherite deep down and couldn’t help exclaiming at one point: “The debt’s not falling, it’s still going up.” But both also promised billions in extra spending at times. That easy-going prodigality was fine with the studio audience and probably with the pundits too – again, it’s the CV of the political class – but it must have alarmed millions of responsible voters who are only now emerging shell-shocked from the 2008 crash and recession.

All of which suggests that on the morning of May 8th the pundits may be even more surprised than the rest of us.